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Salon Media Group, the parent company of online magazine Salon, has long been bleeding cash and is rumored to be in search of a buyer. According to reports, it appears to have attracted a serious and rather aggressive young suitor. Twenty-four-year-old entrepreneur Bhu Srinkivasan has set up a holding company called Salon Holdings. If his gambit works, he will use Salon Holdings to buy out Salon, lay off all but a few members of its editorial staff, and turn it into an online repository for content from highbrow sources such as Atlantic Monthly and The New Yorker. Some wonder whether the lack of original content might turn off some of Salon’s 3.5 million monthly visitors. Srinkivasan has said publicly that this is, in fact, quite likely, but that eliminating original content is the only way to make the company profitable. Salon has not commented on the potential takeover but yesterday issued a statement announcing that its premium service has attracted 10,000 paying subscribers. Srinkivasan has a background in online content and software syndication, having founded and headed up a recently defunct syndication software company called ThinkView. He also worked for InfoSpace.
Study: Pediatric health sites really are confusing
Fifty percent of adults in the U.S. who look to the web for information about their children’s health can’t fully understand what they’ve found, according to a study in the current edition of the Archives of Pediatrics and Adolescent Medicine. This is because half of literate U.S. parents have attained no more than an eighth-grade reading level, while 75 percent of medical information sites’ content is written at a 10th-grade reading level, according to researchers based at the Children's Hospital of Iowa. Researchers evaluated 100 consumer-oriented health web sites, including sites published by educators, independent companies, health care providers and the government. The literacy barrier is also a problem because, according to another report in the pediatrics journal, almost half of U.S. teenagers get their health information online.
U.K. Safeway emails dirty nursery rhymes
Hickory, dickory, what? A woman from the eastern England town of Tyneside got a nasty shock recently after she registered on the web site of grocer Safeway. Brid Fitzpatrick had parted with her personal information in exchange for the chance to win a bottle of wine. Instead, she received an inbox full of off-color interpretations of “Hickory Dickory Dock,” “Old Mother Hubbard,” “Mary, Mary, Quite Contrary” and seven other nursery rhymes. The sexually explicit and violent verses, apparently intended for another recipient, came from a Safeway employee’s company email account. Safeway, which split off from the U.S. chain of the same name in 1987, is investigating the incident. The grocer has not offered an explanation or said if any employees have been disciplined over the incident.
Publishers lose battle over e-books
A U.S. District Judge has ruled that publishing houses do not automatically hold the rights to e-book versions of the works they publish on paper. Judge Sidney Stein's decision states that authors own the rights to electronic versions of their material, unless the contract specifically assigns those rights to the publishing company. Publishers have begun adding specific provisions to their contracts only in the last five years, leaving decades of work available for possible online sale. This is the second time the courts have sided with authors over the issue of online rights to their work. The Supreme Court ruled last month that freelance writers own the electronic rights to their articles, meaning that web sites must give freelancers residual payments in exchange for including their stories in databases.
Napster resolves suits from Dr. Dre and Metallica
Music-swapping service Napster has resolved long-standing lawsuits from a pair of dissimilar but popular musical acts, namely heavy metal band Metallica and rapper Dr. Dre. Both Dr. Dre and Metallica filed the suits in early 2000, at the dawn of the music industry’s crusade to shut the service down. The settlement’s monetary terms weren’t publicized, but Napster more or less apologized to Dr. Dre and Metallica, praising Metallica’s courage and saying that it respects Dr. Dre’s right to manage the delivery of his own material. Metallica will let some of its files be traded on Napster’s forthcoming fee-based service. The band and the rapper, like the rest of the music industry, complained that Napster facilitated the violation of their copyrights by allowing free song swapping. The reconciliation with Dr. Dre and Metallica comes on the heels of a federal judge’s decree that Napster must stay off-line until it can block 100 percent of copyrighted material. Napster, which has been off-line for almost two weeks, has said that it can now block about 99 percent of copyrighted material.
Internet grocer HomeRuns.com strikes out
Just days after the demise of leading internet grocer Webvan, another grocer has gone out of business. HomeRuns.com has ceased operations. It suspended business in Boston and Washington, D.C., yesterday, citing its failure to raise enough cash to keep running. It has canceled all outstanding orders. HomeRuns.com was founded in 1996, making it very old by dot.com standards. It was based in Burlington, Mass., and owned and launched by major bricks-and-mortar grocer Hannaford Brothers, which operates the Hannaford and Shop 'n Save supermarkets. According to reports, HomeRuns.com racked up $30 million in sales in 2000. Webvan and HomeRuns.com are just the latest failed online grocery stores. ShopLink.com and Streamline.com of New England shut their doors last year, and Safeway-funded GroceryWorks.com of Dallas went on hiatus last month.
July 13, 2001 © 2001 Media Life
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